Burning Hate: The Technology King in Albemarle's Court
Tyler Bradley Dykes of Bluffton, South Carolina briefly attended Cornell University in 2018 before dropping out to serve four years in the Marines. As a Marine, Dykes served as a tactical air defense controller, a position that requires a secret security clearance.
When his parents retired and moved to Bluffton, he followed them, starting a small cybersecurity and IT consulting company called Technology King of the Lowcountry. According to Celebrate Bluffton, the Technology King "fights to keep his kingdom safe from the scourge of ransomware, spyware and hackers." But before he became king, he was fighting to rid the kingdom of something entirely different.
Tyler Dykes' attendance at Unite the Right was first uncovered in October 2022 by the antifascist research collective Sunlight Anti-Fascist Action, a group whose motto is "Sunlight really is the best disinfectant".
Images of Dykes during the rally on the morning of August 12th show him shirtless, confused, tearful and red-faced, appearing to have just been pepper sprayed. He's holding a drenched blue dress shirt in his hands. Later images show he appeared to have borrowed a white polo shirt, the uniform favored by members of Vanguard America that day.
The police had declared an unlawful assembly and cleared the park where the rally was set to take place. Unite the Right was canceled before any of the scheduled speakers, celebrities of alt-right podcasting, had a chance to address their fans. The Tyler Dykes of Saturday morning was soaking wet and utterly defeated. This was nothing like the night before when he'd marched, torch in hand, alongside the mob, far outnumbering the counter protesters. With the crowd feeling emboldened by their numbers and the absence of police intervention, pictures and video show Tyler Dykes in the middle of some of the worst moments of the attack at the base of the Thomas Jefferson statue.
Photos show Dykes entering the melee and appearing to throw a punch. Video taken by a Turkish news outlet shows other torch marchers yelling at Dykes to stop as he appears to continue swinging at a counter protester after the police made their way into the center of the mob and the rest of the fighting had subsided. Elliott Kline, the event organizer who had been barking directions at the marchers as they lined up at Nameless Field earlier in the evening, is seen striding toward the last remaining fighter shouting.
Of course, Tyler Dykes is not charged with assault. There's no complaining victim and for what would likely be a misdemeanor, the statute of limitations has long expired. In February 2023, a grand jury in Albemarle County returned an indictment for the class 6 felony of burning an object in a public place with the intent to intimidate. After five years of anonymity and five and a half years of thinking his actions that night would stay in the past, Dykes was arrested in South Carolina and extradited to Virginia on the charge.
Any halfway-decent defense attorney will argue that it isn't possible to know Dykes' intent when he lit that torch on a hot summer night in Charlottesville, but any prosecutor who did his homework could counter with this video - after the counter protesters escaped from the violence at the base of the statue, the white supremacists claimed victory, occupying the space and chanting "White lives matter!" They cheered and pumped their fists. Richard Spencer was about to deliver a victory speech. Tyler Dykes can be seen walking around the base of the statue, as if surveying the area under their occupation, celebrating with his right arm raised in a stiff armed Hitler salute.
For his part in that Friday night march in 2017, Tyler Bradley Dykes was returned to Charlottesville on another Friday night – he was booked into the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail just before midnight on April 14, 2023. His trial date has not been set.
This is the first installment in the Burning Hate series - stories of the men who marched with tiki torches on August 11, 2017.